Monday, April 4, 2011

We continue with our Earth Day campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book, where we share with you 41 reasons provided by readers in celebration of the upcoming 41st anniversary of Earth Day!

With more than 180,000 trees planted so far on behalf of readers, authors and publishers working with Eco-Libris, it's no surprise that we think planting trees to green up books is a great idea.. But we also want to hear what readers think about it and why they believe planting trees for their books is a good idea.

So for 41 days until Earth Day, we publish here the 41 best replies we receive, one reply a day. All replies are gathered and presented on the Earth Day 2011page.

Bird Cloud: A Memoir by Annie Proulx - "Bird Cloud" is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.

Proulx's first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians— and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time. Bird Cloud is magnificent.

If you want to participate inthe campaign, we still have some spots available so please send us your reply it to info@ecolibris.net. We look forward to hearing from you.

If you follow this blog for some time, you already know we write extensively on the possibility that Barnes & Noble will follow Borders and file for bankruptcy. We really don't want it to happen, so as I was thinking about ways B&N could avoid bankruptcy, I realized that green strategy might be the solution for B&N.

Why a Green Strategy Will Help Barnes & Noble Avoid Bankruptcy?If you want to know the answer, or at least my thoughts about the answer, you're welcome to read my article about it at Triple Pundit.

Here's the first paragraph of the article:

This is not the best of times for Barnes & Noble. B&N shares have lost about 50% of their value in the last couple of weeks and it doesn’t look like B&N can find a buyer, regardless of the low price. Not surprisingly, there is a growing concern that B&N may eventually follow Borders and file for bankruptcy.

B&N is in a search to redefine its business model. They really don’t have a choice as the traditional brick and mortar bookstores model doesn’t work that well anymore. It’s true they got the Nook, but they also have 705 stores with 18.4 million square feet (not including B&N College stores) they need to transform back into an asset to stay in business.

So here is an idea – how about adopting a green strategy to avoid bankruptcy?

ebooks vs. paper books:

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Founded in 2007, Eco-Libris is a green company working to green up the book industry in the digital age by promoting the adoption of green practices in the book industry, balancing out books by planting trees, and helping to make e-reading greener.

To achieve these goals Eco-Libris is working with book readers, publishers, authors, bookstores and others in the book industry worldwide. So far Eco-Libris balanced out over 179,500 books, which results in more than 200,000 new trees planted with its planting partners in developing countries.